While Al Gore is suggesting that climate-change realists be punished and schoolchildren braved a snowstorm to hear a rapper give a “happy” climate-alarmism message, an environmentalist presented a truly happy message on the subject:

Climate change isn’t caused by man, there’s been no significant warming for nearly two decades, and, even if there had been, it would probably be a good thing.

Patrick Moore (shown) is no newcomer to environmentalism. Boasting a Ph.D. in ecology, he became a founding member of Greenpeace in 1971 and has been a leader in international environmentalism for more than four decades. And now he has penned an article entitled “Why I am a Climate Change Skeptic,” in which he says that while we’re told the “debate is over” and the “science is settled,” there’s actually “no scientific proof” of the Anthropogenic (man-caused) Global Warming thesis.

Pointing out there’s no correlation between man’s CO2 emissions and rising temperatures, Dr. Moore writes, “The Earth has been warming very gradually for 300 years, since the Little Ice Age ended, long before heavy use of fossil fuels. Prior to the Little Ice Age, during the Medieval Warm Period, Vikings colonized Greenland and Newfoundland, when it was warmer there than today. And during Roman times, it was warmer, long before fossil fuels revolutionized civilization.”

In fact, global warming might have helped inspire the fifth-century invasion of Roman Britannia by the Saxons, whose low-lying traditional areas were being flooded by rising oceans. As for current times, for 18 years temperatures have been stable — and might even have dropped — even though this period saw man emit fully a quarter of the CO2 ever emitted.

Moore mentions how, despite the above, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) claims that we face disaster unless we eliminate CO2 emissions completely. He says this is a cure worse than the supposed disease, as it would mean eliminating the Earth’s entire human population or returning to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle of 10,000 years ago. (This partially explains why certain radical interests want to reduce the world’s population precipitously. We already face an impending population implosion, however, as The New American had reported here.)

CO2 Is Our Friend

But don’t we face a CO2 explosion? Not exactly. And even if we did, it would be a positive development.

While some have ridiculously labeled the gas a “pollutant,” it is the “most important food for life on earth,” writes Moore. He continues, “Without carbon dioxide above 150 parts per million, all plants would die.”

So beneficial is the gas that the Center for Global Food Issues wrote that the “abundant plant life” of 100 million years ago, and the huge dinosaurs it sustained, were enabled by CO2 levels five to ten times today’s. Furthermore, writes the organization, “Based on nearly 800 scientific observations around the world, a doubling of CO2 from present levels would improve plant productivity on average by 32 percent across species.” This is well understood by botanists, by the way, and is why they pump copious amounts of the gas into their greenhouses.

The optimum CO2 level for plant growth is 1,500 parts per million (ppm), almost four times the current level, says Dr. Moore. It was 3,000 ppm 150 million years ago (dino industry, I guess), but since that time it had been gradually used up by plants until it declined to a mere 280 ppm prior to the Industrial Revolution. Had this trend not reversed, the CO2 “level would have become too low to support life on Earth,” writes Moore. In fact, he credits man’s fossil fuel use and clearing of land for agriculture with boosting the gas “from its lowest level in the history of the Earth back to 400 parts per million today.”

Even at this level, though, writes Moore, “all our food crops, forests, and natural ecosystems are still on a starvation diet.”

Whether or not man’s activities were necessary for the recent recovery in CO2 levels, what’s for certain is that the gas is to be welcomed, not feared. Put simply, if its level drops too low, crops’ and other plants’ growth is compromised, the food chain collapses, and animals and people die.

Moore points out that the IPCC, for instance, has a damning conflict of interest: Its mandate is to investigate only the alleged human causes of climate change. So not only is our understanding of the factors influencing climate relatively poor, but the IPCC will not even consider the natural ones, which constitute all or at least most of them and which could place any anthropogenic factors in perspective. And, well, when you only get paid for hammering, you just might claim everything is a nail. If the IPCC ever acknowledged that man-caused factors were non-existent, negligible, or even positive, its funding would be gone and its scientists and bureaucrats unemployed.

Yet the corruption extends far. Writing of a perfect storm of conflict of interest, Moore explains why other groups push the AGW con:

Environmentalists spread fear and raise donations; politicians appear to be saving the Earth from doom; the media has a field day with sensation and conflict; science institutions raise billions in grants, create whole new departments, and stoke a feeding frenzy of scary scenarios; business wants to look green, and get huge public subsidies for projects that would otherwise be economic losers, such as wind farms and solar arrays.... [And] the Left sees climate change as a perfect means to redistribute wealth from industrial countries to the developing world and the UN bureaucracy.

Lastly, Dr. Moore points out that AGW is ideal for mobilizing the world because it supposedly threatens the planet’s every region, animal, and person. And it trades on fear and guilt. Adults are supposed to feel bad, and children scared, because inaction means bequeathing a broken world to posterity. And one-worlders love it because they can bill a worldwide controlling regime as necessary to solve a worldwide problem.

Unfortunately, the AGW con merely reflects a scientific world so rife with fraud today that one leading computer scientist claimed that three-quarters of the papers in his field were “bunk,” as I reported in “Blinding Me With Science: Fraud and Folly for Fame and Funding.” And, in fact, the truth on climate might just be the polar opposite of notions of polar melt-off. Some researchers claim — as I was warned of as a child in the ’70s — that we’re actually poised to enter another ice age.

Whatever the case, with the first day of spring greeting New Yorkers with yet another snowstorm, some global warming would be a welcome change.

Photo: Patrick Moore

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